ShareThisMEXICO CITY - The former rector of the National Autonomous University here, Juan Ramon de la Fuente, published 30 questions he would ask the presidential candidates of the top three parties who are preparing for this nation's July presidential election.
Originally published in the daily El Universal, the questions became the topic in a popular news-analysis program on Jan. 9. De la Fuente's questions try to reverse the trend toward ideology and platitudes where politicians invent the issue or simply restate it. Needed, instead, is to find out what they are going to do about our questions, not theirs. Here are some of what de la Fuente, who now heads a university association, asks:
Unemployment, how to eliminate it?
Crime, how to control it?
Consumerism, how to moderate it?
Sustainable development, how to favor it?
Excessive public debt, how to liquidate it?
Drugs, how to regulate them?
Energy, how to optimize it?
The public-interest topics are intended to differentiate the political parties and their leading figures.
Disarmament, how to obligate it?
Understanding, how to spread it?
Culture, how to share it?
Oceans, how to regulate them?
Poverty, how to eradicate it?
Refugees, how to support them?
Transport, how to make it more efficient?
We in the United States, like our Mexican neighbors, have an election process in which parties and their standard-bearers profess to have the answers. The candidates' objectives seem to be to satisfy enough of the voting public to get themselves into office, then prepare how to finance and leverage the next election.
The approach is seriously questioned in Mexico, as it is in the United States. It is as if elections are about getting ready for disappearing issues. The ploy is as old as Richard Nixon's "secret plan" for ending the war in Vietnam. He had to get elected for the public to find out he had none.
But it now goes from deceit to comedy. For instance, one press commentator tried to stir things up by bringing up that Mitt Romney could become the first Mexican-American president because his father was born in Mexico.
Romney was the stooge again in an ad attempting to make him out as a little untoward, a bit foreign. How? Both Newt Gingrich and Democrats, in negative ads, show him speaking French. Romney had lived part of his young life in France. He was shown -- successfully, I might add -- in that other tongue promoting the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics. The ad doesn't disclose that French is the official language of the Olympics, for God's sake.
But the real plot was to make him a bit foreignish, Frenchified, not cornpone enough, if you know what I mean.
Health, how to maintain it?
Old age, how to benefit from it?
Family, how to encourage cohesion?
Inequality, how to knock it down?
Happiness, how to reach it?
Language, how to preserve it?
Time, how to enjoy it?
Mistreatment of people, how to abolísh it?
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has noted with horror how irrelevant the Republican debates are turning out to be in relation, for instance, to world economic development. South Korea is advancing its economy by putting in an Internet capacity the speed of light and the capacity of a virtual universe.
The problem is not that we are becoming isolationist, but we are too isolationist already.
Trade unionists and ideologues want to take reactionary anti-globalization positions while the rest of the world seeks globalization, competition and development. Mexico, for example, halted its talks with Brazil and South Korea about free trade while it analyzes instead another broader scenario for a trans-Pacific alliance that would include Vietnam.
Somebody (moderators and editors, listen up) is simply not asking the right questions to force the presidential pretenders and their parties to prove they are not lame, that the candidates are not Larry, Curly and Moe.
(Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. Email him at joseisla3(at)yahoo.com.)
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